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6 Theology and the Discernment of God’s Acts in History From Metaphysics to Theology So far, I have tried to lay out an essentially philosophical or metaphysical case for understanding God through the primordiality of the concept of action or agency. I have tried to show how such a concept can comprehend God acting in the world without either “violating” the laws of cause and effect or being subsumed under them. But the question remains: if God is an agent, and if God has exercised agency by acting in the world, how do we discern what those actions are? In other words, how are they picked out from all the other acts that constitute history? As we pursue this question, we move from strictly philosophical analysis into the work of theology, which attempts to identify from within the faith perspective of a particular religious tradition the central acts of God in history. Whether it is possible to identify divine acts outside the theological perspective is a question we will need to consider. Despite resistance from many of its practitioners, theology presumes a metaphysical basis for the notion of God. The work of theology is meaningless unless it presupposes that God acts in the world and expects a response to those acts. But the assumption that God acts implies a metaphysical view of God as an agent, that is, it assumes that God is a particular kind of entity, an agent, not a rock. In this chapter, I want to explore the intersection between the metaphysics of agency and theology’s attempt to identify specific kerygmatic divine acts, despite the fact that some contemporary theologians, such as Kevin Hector in his Theology Without Metaphysics, believe that there can be a theology without metaphysics. Hector’s view is a continuation of the rejection of “natural theology” grounded in the dogmatic theology of Karl Barth who believed that philosophy must not intrude on or set the conditions for the unique revelation of God in the Christ event, a revelation he claimed was not available to philosophy working independently of theology. But Barth’s and Hector’s 129 hesitancy to accept a metaphysical view of God as agent overlooks the fact that any reference to a divine revelation—no matter how it is positioned alongside of or in conflict with “natural” events—already presupposes at least a minimal commitment to the metaphysical view that God is of such a nature as to be able to act through God’s revelations in a world that is other than Godself. The argument I have pursued so far in developing the primordiality of the concept of agency for God is not at odds with the theological project of specifying divine acts in history. My analysis can, however, be supplemented and expanded by bringing it into conversation with some selected contemporary systematic theologians in the Christian tradition whose work complements that of the philosophers I have drawn upon in advancing my project of understanding God as agent. I will take up the issue of metaphysics more fully in my discussion of the work of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg later in this chapter. COMMON GROUND FOR THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY As I have tried to argue, there is a philosophically persuasive case for affirming the primordiality of agency. And that case, which corresponds to the implicit metaphysical assumptions of theology (even when they sometimes seem to be hidden from theologians), requires us to make some assumptions common to both philosophy and theology. One, that the conception of a divine agent is not self-contradictory or inappropriate for a divine reality “worthy of worship,” and this I hope to have shown in the earlier chapters of this book. Two, that if God is an agent capable of performing historical actions in the space-time continuum alongside other agents, then divine acts are not so radically or ontologically different from human acts as to be incapable of being conceived in roughly the same way in which we conceive human acts. Again, this I believe I have shown in my arguments so far in the book. There must be some univocity to the notion of “act” that captures both divine actions and human actions. (This univocal sense of action does not, of course, rule out enormous differences between divine and human acts with respect to the magnitude of their power, efficacy, range, moral quality, decisiveness, etc.) But if they are completely ontologically different, we will have gotten nowhere in relating divine and human...

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